They fire lightning across the screen.
They attack from places you cannot see.
And apparently, if you ask four of them very nicely not to kill you, they may give you 4,200% hidden Magic Find.
An obscure Diablo II easter egg has resurfaced again in 2026, with players continuing to test a bizarre ritual involving exactly four Gloams, Black Souls or Burning Souls.
If the conditions are correct, the monsters stop attacking, move into formation and begin drawing letters with their lightning.
The letters are references to members of the original Diablo II development team.
That part is real.
The considerably stranger part is what supposedly happens underneath it.
Community reverse-engineering and player testing indicate that completing the full ritual in Hell difficulty adds 4,200% Magic Find for the remainder of that game.
The bonus does not appear on the character sheet.
Because apparently 4,200% Magic Find was not quite weird enough already.
How the Gloam Easter Egg Works
The basic setup sounds like the sort of instruction somebody would have invented on a forum in 2003.
You need exactly four Gloam-type monsters nearby.
Other enemies must be cleared away.
You then stop attacking.
Your Mercenary and summons cannot attack them either.
Eventually, the four Souls stop behaving normally.
Instead of firing lightning directly at you, they begin moving into formations and using their attacks to draw letters on the ground.
After completing the sequence, they return to normal behaviour.
Which means the traditional reward for successfully performing the ritual is still:
Four Gloams trying to kill you.
Diablo II remains Diablo II.
The Hidden Magic Find Is the Really Strange Part
The easter egg became much more interesting when modders and players began examining what the game was actually doing during the sequence.
A long-running Blizzard forum report claims that every completed letter adds hidden Magic Find based on difficulty:
- Normal: 50% per participating Soul per letter
- Nightmare: 100%
- Hell: 150%
With four Souls participating across seven letters, the Hell calculation becomes:
4 × 7 × 150 = 4,200% Magic Find.
The value is not displayed in Diablo II: Resurrected's normal stat interface.
Players instead noticed dramatic changes in item-quality distribution after performing the ritual, while members of the modding community say the relevant behaviour can be found in reverse-engineered Diablo II code.
That is much stronger evidence than simply killing Baal once and getting a Shako.
But Blizzard has never published an official modern explanation saying:
Yes, those four lightning ghosts just gave you 4,200 MF.
So the safest description remains community-documented rather than officially confirmed.
Players Are Still Doing It in 2026
This is not merely an old forum curiosity.
Players have continued experimenting with the ritual throughout 2026.
One February discussion shows players successfully triggering it and debating how the enormous hidden MF bonus was originally discovered.
Another player in July said they finally managed to complete the ritual and immediately began running high-value farming areas in the same game.
The original Blizzard thread was even bumped again on August 24.
Although, amusingly, the newest contribution was primarily to remind everyone that the monster is called a Gloam.
Not a Gloom.
Twenty-six years later, Diablo II's real endgame is spelling.
Why Would Anyone Need 4,200% Magic Find?
There is a major catch.
Magic Find has diminishing returns when determining Unique, Set and Rare item quality.
So 4,200% MF does not mean you suddenly receive forty-two times as many Unique items.
Far from it.
Once your Magic Find is already reasonably high, piling thousands more onto the character produces increasingly small improvements to Unique-item odds.
That means performing the entire ritual before every two-minute farming run would be spectacularly inefficient.
By the time the Gloams have completed their electrical PowerPoint presentation, a normal character could have killed Mephisto several times.
Reign of the Warlock May Have Made the Easter Egg More Useful
This is where modern Diablo II becomes interesting.
Reign of the Warlock encourages players to remain inside the same game for longer periods.
Heralds of Terror reward extended Terror Zone farming, and the newer endgame systems give players more reasons to keep clearing rather than immediately creating another game.
That changes the economics of the Gloam ritual.
If the hidden Magic Find lasts until you leave the current game, spending several minutes activating it makes more sense when you plan to stay in that session for a long time.
Especially now that Season 15 has reduced the effectiveness of ordinary Magic Find for Latent Sunder farming, players are once again looking carefully at every strange corner of Diablo II's loot systems.
The Gloam bonus will not improve every special drop system.
But for ordinary item-quality farming, several thousand hidden MF is at least interesting enough to experiment with.
You Can Apparently Stack It
And because Diablo II never knows when to stop, players say the ritual can be performed more than once in the same game.
A second successful pack of four Gloams can reportedly add another full bonus.
That would theoretically take the player to 8,400% additional Magic Find.
At that point, the practical benefit is increasingly questionable because of diminishing returns.
But practical benefit has never stopped Diablo players from making a number larger.
If Blizzard accidentally added a button labelled:
+0.3% efficiency, but the number becomes enormous
somebody would press it.
The Hardest Part Is Keeping Four Gloams Alive
Actually performing the ritual is less relaxing than the word “easter egg” suggests.
You need to:
- Find a zone containing Gloam-type monsters
- Leave exactly four alive
- Remove every other nearby enemy
- Prevent Mercenaries and summons from attacking
- Avoid killing the Gloams yourself
- Survive long enough for the entire animation to complete
Popular locations include the Great Marsh, Swampy Pit, Plains of Despair, Worldstone Keep and Throne of Destruction.
High Lightning Resistance is strongly recommended.
Possibly also emotional preparation.
You are deliberately leaving four Souls alive and waiting for them to do something.
Every instinct developed while playing Diablo II is screaming at you to do the opposite.
Is the 4,200% Magic Find Bonus Actually Real?
The evidence is unusually good for something this ridiculous.
The monster behaviour itself is well documented.
Players have repeatedly reproduced it in Diablo II: Resurrected.
The Magic Find effect has been tested using characters with deliberately manipulated negative Magic Find values, while Diablo II modders have pointed toward the corresponding logic in reverse-engineered game code.
Still, we would draw an important line between:
community verification
and
official Blizzard documentation.
Blizzard has never given players a nice tooltip explaining the Gloam ritual or its hidden loot bonus.
And considering the easter egg has survived for decades, perhaps nobody should encourage them to look at it too closely.
Diablo II Still Has the Best Kind of Weird Secrets
This is why the Gloam ritual remains fascinating even if performing it is not mathematically optimal farming.
Modern games tend to document everything.
Systems have tooltips.
Quests have markers.
Patch notes explain the mechanics.
Diablo II contains four floating lightning monsters that suddenly stop murdering you, spell out developer references and apparently alter your hidden loot calculations by several thousand percent.
And players are still arguing about it decades later.
Reign of the Warlock has turned Diablo II into a living game again, complete with new classes, new items and debates over things like a dedicated Charm Inventory.
But sometimes the best Diablo II content is still something Blizzard quietly buried inside the game before many of today's players had broadband.
Four Gloams.
Seven letters.
Potentially 4,200% hidden Magic Find.
And somehow the least believable part is that you have to resist killing them.
Sources
Diablo II: Resurrected Forums: Old Easter Egg Allows You to Get Huge MF Boost
The Phrozen Keep: D2MOO Diablo II Reverse-Engineering Project
Diablo II Community: Gloam Easter Egg Testing and Code Discussion
```
